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Rajasthan Royals’ head coach talks about goals, challenges, and the advantage of multiple World Cup winners in the squad

Interview by Andrew Miller14-Sep-2020It’s your first big IPL assignment, albeit in very unusual circumstances. How are you feeling ahead of the challenge?
I’m just grateful for the opportunity to play cricket in the current landscape, to be quite honest. The BCCI and the cricketing community have done a fantastic job to get this tournament up and running, and it’s so far so good in terms of the preparation. Everyone’s got here safely so far, and we’re just waiting for the international players to join us from the England bubble and complete our full roster.Clearly there are some decisions to be made about quarantine periods, if there are any, and whether those guys [group of players from the ongoing England v Australia series] are going to be available for the first game. But we’ve got a few plans in place – with and without [them] – and we’re preparing for both scenarios.The mental side of the game could be especially important this season after such a prolonged lockdown.

Tournaments are won and lost on and off the field at the best of times, but this year off the field is critically important. We will need to create options within the restricted confines of the bubble, and keep our guys balanced and sometimes get their minds away from cricket.We’ll look to have gatherings at certain times and give the guys different stimulus, in and out of the bubble, to create the sort of environment that they normally have, where they can get away from the game and aren’t just switched on to cricket all the time.That’s one challenge for us. The other will come once the first team is picked. At that moment, there will be 14 players who aren’t involved and 11 who are. Managing those guys to keep them ready and prepared is a great challenge in any tournament, but more so in this one, to my mind.

Steve Smith is clearly the captain, but it’s great to have other guys in supporting roles, with the ability to think on their feet when things don’t go to plan…we’ve got Sanju [Samson], who thinks differently to Smudge, who thinks differently to [Robin] Uthappa. And there’s Jos [Buttler]…Andrew McDonald on Royals’ leadership group

Rajasthan has positioned itself as the ‘English’ IPL franchise in recent seasons. How helpful will it be to have a range of overseas players who have got meaningful match practice under their belts?
Definitely, match-hardened players will have an advantage. We’ve had to be creative to overcome the restrictions on practice games, but with a significant percentage of our group having already played, it positions us quite well. Then again, they’ve had the challenges of the bubble in England already, so when they come into another bubble, that might well be something that we need to manage along the wayThis tournament is going to be all about managing the individual. The collective team goal is at stake, obviously, but we will have to assess all 25 players, and tailor their individual programmes for individual needs, and individual time away. And that includes the coaching staff too. Sometimes we forget that coaches are going through exactly the same thing, so we’ll need to have an understanding of where everyone’s at throughout the tournament. If we can manage that well, it might give us a slight advantage. Who knows?ALSO READ: Interview with David Miller: ‘I want to finish games like Dhoni does’There’s doubt about Ben Stokes’ involvement in this year’s IPL. Quite apart from the personal issues he’s going through, that’s a big hole to fill in your middle order?
First and foremost, thoughts with the Stokes family. It’s a difficult scenario, so we’re giving him as much time as he needs, and connecting with him as best we can. So yeah, we’re not sure where Stokesy’s at right now, but once it has played out, then we can make our decisions from there. But I don’t want to second-guess what will happen with him just yet.How about Steven Smith? He missed two Australia ODIs with concussion. Is that a concern for the squad right now?
Steve Smith is a bit more clear-cut, I think. He needs a little bit of time, it was a short turnaround between game one and two where the concussion happened, so I’d imagine there were some lingering side effects. They’ll be erring on the side of caution, so hopefully [they will] see him out there again on Wednesday [for the third ODI against England in Manchester].You’re going to have other moving parts throughout the tournament. There will be injuries, fatigue, all sorts of things. So while there’s speculation around where Smudger’s at, and Stokesy, we feel we’ve got some good coverage to be able to play different ways.We’ve added some depth in terms of our left-hand batting, in particular in [Anuj] Rawat and [Yashashvi] Jaiswal among the home-grown players, so we think we’ve got some options there. The way we set up at the auction, we feel we can structure our side up to three or four different ways.4:47

Will Yashasvi Jaiswal be breakthrough star for Rajasthan Royals in IPL 2020?

And what about David Miller? As the England-Australia T20Is showed, it’s increasingly difficult for middle-order players to hit the ground running. He’s got a proven ability to do just that.

He’s definitely one of the most devastating finishers in the game, but it’s a really thankless task too. We critique and criticise those guys probably a bit too much. They’re the guys that either fail or succeed at the end there, and there’s a lot more failures than successes within that role. We understand that and, yeah, we’re gearing David up for that role but potentially other roles too, depending on the surfaces and the opposition.He’s got great flexibility. He was at Kings XI [Punjab] for a long time, so I’m hoping that that change of environment sparks his best form. He’s really fitted into our environment well. He was the first overseas player to land, which is great because usually you don’t get access to the overseas guys until 10 days out or sometimes less. He’s been nothing but fantastic so far for the group, helping our young left-handers in particular, and just creating energy around the group. And his fielding is second to none.ALSO READ: Royals’ Yashasvi Jaiswal among promising uncapped Indian batsmenIt feels like a big tournament for Yashasvi Jaiswal. Is he ready to make the step-up from his starring role at the Under-19 World Cup earlier this year?
The step from Under-19 cricket to first-class cricket and the IPL is still a significant one and we’re not sure how that will go for him. But everything he’s done on the training ground and in the first practice game suggests that he will make that leap.But not everything is on him. There’s other guys as well – Anuj Rawat, Manan Vohra is an experienced player who’ll be in and around that as well. Shashank Singh has had a fantastic training block as well. But definitely Jaiswal’s one to watch. We’re excited if he does get exposure in this tournament; we feel like we’ve got one for the future there, no doubt.We’re not sure where we’ll bat Jaiswal yet. As a left-hander, he could maybe go at the top, or in the middle against spin, because last year we had that run of right-handers which was very easy for the opposition to prepare against and play against. We feel as though that we’ve got some left-handed options that can disrupt the tactics of the opposition, so it’s really about where we place them, and at what time.What do you make of your leadership group? There seem to be plenty of candidates to lead the side, particularly if Smith or Buttler are absent.
Steve Smith is clearly the captain, but it’s great to have other guys in supporting roles, with the ability to think on their feet when things don’t go to plan. We’ve got some really good minds out there, and they’re all different as well which is great. If you’ve got guys that all think similarly, then sometimes you probably get the same result.But we’ve got Sanju [Samson], who thinks differently to Smudge, who thinks differently to [Robin] Uthappa. And there’s Jos, a fantastic player who’s had a fantastic summer for England, and there’s no surprises in him performing at the level that he does.Andrew McDonald, Rajasthan’s head coach, with Zubin Bharucha, head of cricket•Rajasthan RoyalsThere’s a predominance of right-arm seam in your attack, albeit boasting a range of different styles. Are you happy with the variety you can bring to your best XI?
I think so. Obviously, there’s Jofra [Archer] – there’s not two of him, there aren’t many similarities between him and other bowlers in the world. Oshane Thomas can do a role up front, in particular with steep bounce and serious ball speed.Then we’ve got Tom Curran, who, in every game, he wants the ball at the death and he’s got good yorkers and variations. And then there’s AJ Tye, a guy who was coming off a long-term injury. He might have been touch-and-go for the original tournament, but potentially Covid gave him a little bit of extra time.ALSO READ: Preview: Combination questions for Royals with Stokes doubtfulYou mentioned the left-arm angle and left-arm quicks, they are scarce in the marketplace, so we feel as though we’ve got a good one in JD [Jaydev Unadkat].You go into each auction and you look at the left-arm quicks, there’s not many out there so, yeah, it’s supply and demand really. Would we like more depth in that area? Potentially, but we’ve got some good complementary skill sets in Varun [Aaron] and [Ankit] Rajpoot, who we traded for. We feel as though he’s got some good variations and skills, and those two right-armers in particular are quite different. So it gives us more flexibility and then also we’ve got Aakash Singh, who’s our left-arm guy who we potentially can develop, hopefully if he’s fast-tracked, in this tournament. Yeah, he may surprise a few towards the middle and back end of the tournamentAnd there’s [Kartik] Tyagi as well, coming out of the Under-19 World Cup. It’s a little bit of the unknown stepping up from that U-19 level into the IPL, but so far so good with those two young bowlers, Tyagi and Aakash. And Aakash, a young left-armer, so that’s a premium; [he] gives us back-up to JD if something were to go wrong there.How exciting is it to see Jofra’s white-ball form? He’s been at the top of his game against Australia.
He lights it up, doesn’t he? There’s moments in games where he senses it and he goes for it. He’s exciting; you never know what you’re going get with great fast bowlers and although he’s got a long way to go to be in that sort of conversation, he’s stepping his way towards that, isn’t he?How much of a lift will it give the squad to be able to take the field with potentially three of the key architects [Stokes, Buttler, and Archer] of England’s World Cup victory last year?

We’re very, very fortunate to have such players within our set-up. Steve Smith, in 2015, is another. It gives you great confidence that their skill-sets held up under such extreme pressure. To be the favourites heading in their home tournament, to have a slight wobble, and then to forge a way through, shows great character but also skill, because character and temperament are one thing, but that group [England in 2019 World Cup] was highly skilled as well.Hopefully they can share those experiences, because that’s the great thing about the IPL. If you think back to the first tournament in 2008, the merging of all those different nations and the ideas that were shared, helped to accelerate the game. So I hope that the young players tap into that experience and talk about those World Cup moments, and learn from them and take away some significant information that will help them forge their careers as well.

Not too long ago, he wasn’t considered to be T20 material. On Tuesday, he blitzed his way to deliver Pakistan’s first win on tour

Danyal Rasool22-Dec-2020It’s been a complicated few days for Mohammad Rizwan. After being named the best player of the Test series over in England in the summer, he was catapulted to levels of prominence that seemed unlikely to come his way while he served as understudy to Pakistan’s then all-format captain Sarfaraz Ahmed.He was named vice-captain of the Test side only last month, but with Babar Azam ruled out of the first Test, he is set to lead a side he has only played for nine times out in the Boxing Day Test against New Zealand. Only Javed Burki in the 1960s has played fewer Tests before being elevated to the captaincy. Rizwan’s stock has never been higher.Oddly, though entirely fittingly in the bizarre world of Pakistan cricket, the levels of criticism he endured were never fiercer either. You see, Azam’s absence in the T20Is meant someone had to do a fairly straightforward job – replacing the world’s number two T20I batsman at the top of that Pakistan order. And who did they entrust? Of course Rizwan, sent on that hiding to nothing.Having struggled to get going in the first two T20Is, he was singled out for Pakistan’s lacklustre performances, with his selection forensically scrutinised. There were calls for Sarfaraz to replace him in the side – though Sarfaraz would never have opened the innings, so that problem still remained. Either way, Rizwan walked out on Tuesday with a target on his back – and not just from the opposition.Things didn’t look much better when he struggled for fluency in the Powerplay, unable either to get his shots away or get the more belligerent Haider Ali on strike – the 20-year old faced just nine balls in the first five overs. When he did bring up his half-century off 40 balls, he had picked up the pace, but the asking rate kept mounting.Rizwan powered Pakistan’s chase with 89 off 59•AFP/Getty ImagesRizwan, however, is a patient man. He had spent two years out of the side, often not even deemed necessary to be part of the travelling contingent as the second-choice wicketkeeper, given how nailed on Sarfaraz was as captain. Some might have complained – Pakistan cricketers are not especially famous for taking prolonged exclusions in good grace. Rizwan kept his head down and trusted the process, and that, it appeared, is what he was doing for the first half of the chase.With the asking rate hovering above ten and Hafeez – the likeliest to win this match for Pakistan given his sparkling 2020 – gone, it is worth reminding oneself this is very much not Rizwan’s game. A man who wasn’t even trusted by his PSL franchise, the Karachi Kings, to so much as play for them had been was being asked to open the innings for Pakistan in New Zealand, negotiate Boult, Southee and Jamieson in the Powerplay while keeping the asking rate down, and finish off by blitzing said good bowlers at the death.Check, check, check. Half an hour later, Rizwan would walk off the Napier field having just played a T20 knock for the ages. In one of Pakistan’s finest away chases, he took just 18 balls to score his final 38 runs, all the while negotiating a steady trickle of Pakistan wickets from the other end that threatened to make things interesting again. He was unfortunate not to hit the winning runs, but it’s unlikely Iftikhar Ahmed would have had the confidence, or the opportunity, to finish things off with such aplomb had it not been for Rizwan’s unlikely, analytics-defying knock.It doesn’t take long to chip away at a player’s confidence, and head coach Misbah-ul-Haq was particularly cognizant of that in the post-match presser. “It’s always very encouraging to see Rizwan respond like that just after finding out he will be the Test captain. We know that in these conditions, that series is going to test us. But Rizwan’s own confidence will go a long way to helping the Pakistan team in the Tests.”I think it was a tough series for us in terms of preparation, the way we got only six days to prepare for such competitive cricket. It was a bit tough on the guys, but the responded well and tried their level best. We finally got a much needed win today. I’m happy with Rizwan’s performance, who was under pressure from the previous two games today. “Very pleased with this performance, and hopefully he, and all of us, can take this confidence into the Test series. It’s a great morale boost for him to be the one that gets these runs, setting an example for the team now that he’s captain.”This was a team Rizwan wasn’t a part of for several years, one that, had most had their way, he might not have been a part of even today. Perhaps there’s a case to be made this performance will end up as more an outlier than anything suggestive of a fresh trend for Rizwan’s T20I career, and time will certainly tell. But you might excuse Rizwan for not being too fussed about that one just yet. The statistics may not support him, but as Rizwan prepares to take charge of a Pakistan Test side, he may feel he has little use for likelihoods and probabilities.

Lyon debuted after Australia tried 11 spinners post Shane Warne, and is now among the most successful spinners

Andrew McGlashan14-Jan-2021August 2011: First ball
Introduced in the 16th over of Sri Lanka’s first innings by Michael Clarke, Lyon landed the perfect offbreak from around the wicket to Kumar Sangakkara, finding the edge which the captain grabbed at slip. Here’s how our ball-by-ball commentary recorded the moment:Lyon would finish with 5 for 34 in the first innings to help set up a victory that would ultimately give Australia the series.November 2011: First home Test
A few months later, Lyon made his first appearance on home soil and claimed seven wickets in the match against New Zealand at the Gabba.February-August 2013: In and out
Lyon had been a consistent performer, including getting 12 wickets in the last two Tests on a tour to West Indies in 2012. He revealed late last year in an interview with the that that tour had included a heart-to-heart with Justin Langer, then the team’s batting coach, about the realities of making it as a Test cricketer. “That was probably the biggest for me, that ‘this is real’,” Lyon said. “That the honeymoon was officially over.”A first tour to India in early 2013 would be a big challenge and it was there, in the months to come, that he suffered the most uncertain part of his career amid some curious selection decisions. He was dropped after the first Test in India where he had been battered by MS Dhoni to the tune of 3 for 215 in Chennai, but returned later in the series and claimed 7 for 94 in Delhi. However, come Australia’s next Test – the first of 2013 Ashes at Trent Bridge – Lyon was left out in favour of Ashton Agar. But two Tests later, he was back and has not missed a game since.Nathan Lyon’s 100th Test wicket came the MCG in December 2013•Getty ImagesDecember 2013: 100th wicket
The first milestone wicket, as Lyon brought up his century, came during the Boxing Day Ashes Test against England. It wasn’t a huge scalp in itself – Stuart Broad caught at slip – but it was part of his first five-wicket haul on home soil as his 5 for 50, including the wickets of Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell, ensured Australia’s quest for 5-0 remained on track.December 2014: Matchwinner at home
An emotionally charged Test in Adelaide, in the wake of the death of Phillip Hughes, ended in Australian victory when Lyon grabbed his 12th wicket of the match to finally end a brave India chase. He claimed 7 for 152 in the second innings – including M Vijay for 99 – to end a stand of 185 with Virat Kohli which had put India on course to hunt down 364 on the final day. He then spun through the middle order, which included having Kohli taken at deep midwicket.June 2015: GOAT
A nickname that remains to this day became official in Jamaica when Lyon claimed his 142nd Test wicket to become Australia’s most successful Test offspinner ahead of Hugh Trumble. “I’ve got a lot of learning to do and I’m really enjoying it and hopefully it’s just the start,” he said.July 2016: 200th wicket
The double century was brought up in the country of his debut – when he had Dhananjaya de Silva caught at mid-off in Kandy – but this time it was not part of victory as Australia lost by 106 runs and were whitewashed in the three-match series.March 2017: Career-best
What remains Lyon’s best haul to date came when he bowled out India on the opening day in Bengaluru with 8 for 50. However, it could not bring victory as despite a lead of 87 in the first innings, India fought back to defend 188. It was, though, a period of considerable success for Lyon as he took 41 wickets across six Tests – 19 in four Tests against India and 22 in two matches in Bangladesh – that followed later in the year.Nathan Lyon’s ten-wicket match haul at the SCG, his home ground, came against New Zealand in January 2020•Getty ImagesNovember 2017: That run out
To move away from the bowling for a moment, Lyon had a major say on the opening day of the 2017-18 Ashes in the field. With England going well on 145 for 2, James Vince, who was on 83, dropped the ball into the covers and set off. Lyon swooped, collected, threw off balance and hit the stumps direct.March 2018: 300th wicket
The moment of Lyon becoming the sixth Australian to 300 Test wickets was well and truly overshadowed by the drama unfolding around the ball-tampering incident. For the record, it was Kagiso Rabada having a big charge and getting stumped on Tim Paine’s first day as Australia captain.August 2019: Spinning to an Ashes win
Lyon took 6 for 49 on the final day of the opening Test at Edgbaston – a ground where Australia had not won at since 2001 – to secure a 1-0 series lead that would go on to help them retain the Ashes in England for the first time in 18 years. It wasn’t all smooth sailing for him, however, with his missed run out chance at Headingley one of the defining images of an epic tussle.January 2020: Ten on home turf
Lyon’s home venue, the SCG, has not always been his happiest hunting ground. But that changed a year ago when he claimed ten in the match against New Zealand. It left him on 390 Test wickets. However, that last climb to 400 is proving a little tougher than many may have been expected.

The RCB batter says his success this season is all down to batting at a more familiar position in the line-up

Hemant Brar03-Oct-20214:21

Manjrekar: Maxwell has changed the fortunes of RCB

Harpreet Brar had conceded only ten from his first three overs. And that includes two overs against a set Virat Kohli and Devdutt Padikkal.Brar is not a mystery spinner. His method is simple and out there. He tries to hit good length with enough pace on the ball that the batter has no time to set himself up for a big shot. Such is his self-belief that whenever he is brought on and his captain asks him for the plan, he just replies, ” [You don’t worry, I won’t give runs]”.

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Now he is up against Glenn Maxwell. In the previous game between Punjab Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore, Brar had bowled Maxwell for a first-ball duck. The batter had played back to a delivery he probably should have gone forward to and was beaten on the outside edge. On Sunday, Brar nearly pulled off a repeat. Maxwell once again went back and pushed at the ball. This time he got an outside edge but KL Rahul failed to latch on to it.By the time Brar came for his final over – the 13th of the innings – Maxwell seemed to have adjusted to his pace and length. On the second ball of the over, Brar erred a little on the shorter side, and that was enough for Maxwell to go back and across and pull it for a six. Two balls later, Brar bowled on the fuller side and Maxwell sent it into orbit over deep midwicket.Then, it was Ravi Bishnoi in the firing line, with Maxwell hitting him for back-to-back sixes. The first was a googly, which bobbled right into Maxwell’s hitting arc and was deposited over cow corner. Bishnoi went full on the next ball, only to be walloped down the ground.During his 33-ball 57, Maxwell scored only 19 off 16 balls against seamers. But against spinners, he plundered 38 off 17. In comparison, all other Royal Challengers batters scored only 27 off 37 balls against spin. In fact, this whole season Maxwell has feasted on spinners, taking 216 runs off 137 balls at an average of 54.00 and a strike rate of 157.66. So that was a match-up he nailed.Name that shot – Glenn Maxwell batted in typical Maxwell fashion against Punjab Kings•BCCIEarlier this week, against Mumbai Indians, Maxwell had used switch hits and reverse hits – against both pace and spin – to target the shorter boundary and give his side what proved to be a winning total. But that was in Dubai. This was Sharjah, where the relaid pitches have made life difficult for batters, where the average first-innings total this season had been 134, where the chasing sides had won four out of five games.So, Kohli’s decision to bat first after winning the toss wasn’t a straightforward one. And even though Maxwell seems to be batting on a different level than anyone else, he too acknowledged this wasn’t an easy pitch.”I felt probably this one was the toughest to adjust to,” he said at the post-match presentation. “It skidded on a little bit more from the spinners, which means you’ve got to be a little bit sharper at the start of the innings. The other wickets held up just a tiny bit more and gave you a bit more time on the back foot.”The ball might have been skidding on, but when Maxwell connected those sixes, it seemed to stay on his bat just a fraction of a second longer, giving his wrists enough time to whip it away. His knock propelled Royal Challengers to 164, the highest total in Sharjah this season, and eventually into the playoffs.During IPL 2020, playing for the Punjab franchise and batting mostly at No. 5, Maxwell had managed only 108 runs in 11 innings. This time, in the same number of innings, he has 407. Maxwell attributed the revival to a familiarity with the role he’s been assigned.”In T20s, I have found a nice little rhythm batting at No. 4,” he said. “It’s something I probably had for Australia over a long period of time as well, which is probably why I have success over there. Coming to the RCB, they wanted me to do the exact same role. It’s been really enjoyable to actually come into the change room and actually have to change not too much.”Maxwell has now scored three half-centuries in the last three games. If he continues his form, it could well be a first IPL title for Royal Challengers.

He has made a name with his free-flowing batting, but his game has been built on the other bits, the ones that don’t get spoken about much

Karthik Krishnaswamy13-Jan-20223:29

Cullinan: Pant’s century the knock of the series

Ten members of India’s batting line-up scored 70 runs between them, off 275 balls. These ten included Virat Kohli, who faced 143 balls and scored 29.You could see why it was such a struggle, because it was never quite clear what halfway safe routes of run-scoring were available on this third-day track from which South Africa’s four-pronged pace attack was able to extract both movement and disconcerting bounce on a regular basis. Even Kohli, who had faced 201 balls in the first innings and scored 79, had only shown he could survive. Run-scoring was another matter entirely.On this track and against the same bowlers, the other member of India’s line-up scored an undefeated 100 off 139 balls. Rishabh Pant was batting on the same pitch and against the same bowlers, but it’s possible he was batting in a parallel universe.Related

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• Why did Rishabh Pant play that shot?

Pant’s control percentage eventually dropped to 83%, given the demands of batting with the tail and trying to manufacture boundaries with nearly every fielder in the deep, but until the time India lost their seventh wicket, he had faced 95 balls and played only eight false shots. He had shown this sort of control while breezing along at a strike rate of nearly 79.There are other cricketers, and there is Rishabh Pant.He’d come into this game with the spotlight trained on him following his dismissal for a duck in the second innings of the second Test in Johannesburg. Criticism of his charge-and-swipe at Kagiso Rabada had spanned a wide spectrum, and ESPNcricinfo had wondered if the shot had stemmed from Pant lacking confidence in his defensive game against an angle of attack – right-arm over – that has troubled him constantly over the last few months.Pant’s innings on Thursday featured no such lack of confidence. He’s incapable of looking anything but nonchalant, of course, but any hypothetical lack of trust in his defensive game also seemed to have vanished.Until the time India lost their seventh wicket, Pant had faced 95 balls and played only eight false shots•Gallo ImagesRoughly midway through his innings, the broadcasters showed a beehive plot of his responses to South Africa’s fast bowlers. He had defended most of the balls clustered in the zone around the top of off stump, left his fair share of deliveries outside off stump, and attacked most of the rest. Pant, of course, is never going to leave as many balls as Kohli has in this Test match, but what stood out was the clear demarcation between those zones, suggesting how well he was judging lines and lengths.This clarity of judgment and decision-making stood out right from the start of Pant’s innings. He didn’t chase at balls angling away from his reach, and avoided driving on the up, but he pounced on the short ball whenever it came.The first two boundaries he hit gave shape to his innings. Rabada was coming towards the end of a breathtaking morning spell, in which he’d dismissed Ajinkya Rahane with an unplayable delivery for the second time in the match. He delivered a good short ball to Pant, angling across him and climbing over his back shoulder; it’s never easy to control the pull from there, but Pant did so with a sort of swatting motion, hitting the ball well in front of square. Then Rabada bowled one that angled a touch too far across, and Pant climbed on top of the bounce and slapped the ball through cover point.

Pant is incapable of looking anything but nonchalant, of course, but any hypothetical lack of trust in his defensive game also seemed to have vanished

While Kohli’s first-innings knock was masterful in many ways, it wasn’t free-scoring, and Sanjay Manjrekar had observed that his run-scoring may have been curtailed by a lack of back-foot scoring options. No such criticism could be made of Pant’s innings.The early pull also made South Africa push deep square leg back, and this gave him a means of rotating strike whenever the bowlers erred marginally straight.Leg-side clips and nudges are a lifeblood for left-hand batters, of course, and Pant’s left-handedness perhaps gave him a small but significant advantage over his team-mates in this innings. The angles are entirely different, and bowlers are bound to err in line ever so slightly more often. Thirty-five of Pant’s runs came via singles, twos and threes on the leg side.The busyness was as responsible as the boundary-hitting for the early pace of Pant’s innings. He’d reached 36 off 41 and almost seen India through to lunch when South Africa became resigned to bringing on their left-arm spinner.Keshav Maharaj had three fielders on the leg-side boundary as soon as he came on, but it was only going to be a matter of time before Pant took them on. In the penultimate over before lunch, he stepped out, didn’t quite reach the pitch of the ball, and almost swung himself off his feet, but made sweet enough contact to clear long-on.Rishabh Pant celebrates his hundred•Getty ImagesSouth Africa persisted with Maharaj after lunch, and he got through two quiet overs before Pant got hold of him, clearing the boundary twice in succession with a one-handed sweep and a drive over mid-off.Pant was taking risks against Maharaj with India’s lead still far from match-winning, but they were calculated risks buttressed by the uniquely Pantian cricketing logic that has characterised all his best knocks – even in extreme cases such as in Chennai last year, when he decided that the best way to deal with Jack Leach’s turn and bounce out of the rough was to step out and try to hit him for sixes. Much of the criticism of Pant’s shot against Rabada in Johannesburg stemmed from the idea that that shot, at that stage of his innings, fell outside the scope of even Pantian logic.At the end of that Maharaj over, India were 151 for 4, effectively 164 for 4, and seemed to be on course to set a target upwards of 250. But a combination of South Africa’s bowling, India’s long tail, and at least two loose shots from the lower order ensured that wasn’t to be.Pant made sure they still set a challenging target, however, bringing out the party tricks that the transformed match situation demanded. A front-foot baseball swat off a short-of-length ball from Duanne Olivier, landing on the boundary cushion at wide long-on. A flailing slash that caused his bat to slip out of his hand and travel nearly as far as the ball did, in the opposite direction. An attempted reverse-sweep that left him flat on his backside. An overhead helicopter flick to retain the strike. A scampered double while running perpendicular to the pitch.These are the Pant moments that will live longest in the memory, and go on to characterise him as a batter and a personality. As they should. But he’s a wicketkeeper who’s scored Test hundreds in England, Australia and South Africa, and he has built that record primarily on the back of the other bits of his game, the bits that don’t get spoken about quite as much.

Houston businessman Sakhi Muhammad has poured his heart and soul into making international cricket a reality in the Lone Star State

Peter Della Penna01-May-2022Since the turn of the millennium, cricket facilities have sprouted up in some unusual places around America and generated widespread acclaim. Lauderhill, Florida (the home of USA’s first ODI accredited stadium) and Morrisville, North Carolina (the host of the 2018 ICC Americas T20 World Cup Qualifier and the inaugural championship weekend in 2021 for Minor League T20 Cricket (MiLC) franchise event) have been at the forefront of USA’s cricket revolution.Though it may have been slightly more anonymous over the last decade, Pearland, Texas – a city of 130,000 people in Brazoria County located 22 miles south of downtown Houston – has been a part of that group too. But its low profile may be a thing of the past after USA Cricket announced on Friday that Pearland’s Moosa Stadium will become USA’s second ODI accredited venue, pending a final rubber stamp from the ICC later this month. It is there that USA will host Scotland and UAE from May 28 through June 4, and then Nepal and Oman from June 8 to June 15 for a total of 12 ODIs across a pair of Cricket World Cup League Two ODI tri-series.Related

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“This is a dream come true for someone from Kamoke, Pakistan,” Sakhi Muhammad, a Houston area businessman who is the owner and founder of Moosa Stadium, told ESPNcricinfo. “For people from small places, it doesn’t matter where you’re born, it matters what you want to do in life. If you keep yourself composed, you can get somewhere.””When I go back for my father Moosa who I named this after, he was five years old when Partition happened and migrated from India. He got separated from his parents and was reunited with his mother after two years. I was 12 when he died. As a kid, you always want to do something with your father, but he died when he was 37 in an accident. What we wanted when we started was to bring some kind of reward for him and to bring his name on the world map. It’s very satisfying and very emotional too at the same time.”Muhammad, 55, left Pakistan early in his adult life for a job in Dubai before marrying a Pakistani-American woman from Houston and moved there in 1996. He worked his way up as an employee at a Mitsubishi car dealership to the point where he bought three of his own car dealerships. Adapting to the Houston sports community, Muhammad was a longtime season-ticket holder of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.Moosa Stadium owner Sakhi Muhammad smiles during an interview from the venue’s opening•Peter Della PennaBut Muhammad said he was spurred to go back to his cricket roots following the death of his mother in 2012. In 2013, his Smart Choice Auto Group became a sponsor of the USA men’s national team, and a short time later he spent $2 million of his own money to secure 24 acres and begin constructing Moosa Stadium in a quiet farmland area on McKeever Road/County Road 100. By 2015, Canada became the first international touring side to Pearland ahead of the ICC Americas T20 World Cup Qualifier at Indianapolis in 2015.By 2017, Moosa Stadium was regularly being used as the host site for USA men’s national team training camps and selection trials, and also welcomed former England captain Charlotte Edwards for a training camp with the USA women that same year. But the facility had a setback in June 2018 during a USA national team selection camp. Six days of consistent rain exposed a poor drainage system at the facility. Though the rain stopped in the days leading up to the camp, the field was still waterlogged on the first two days of the four-day trial, rendering it unplayable. It was a wakeup call to Muhammad that further investment needed to be made to rectify the issue.”There were a couple of broken pipes, which if you don’t fix, it doesn’t help,” Muhammad said. “We knew it needed sand work. But when Sam [Plummer, Moosa Stadium’s curator] left, the guy who came temporarily to replace him, he had no idea. He used a lawnmower to push away the water. If you use a lawnmower, you make it muddier.”Plummer is regarded by many as the most experienced cricket pitch curator in America. Prior to coming to the USA, the Jamaica native worked as a pitch curator at Chedwin Park, a first-class ground in Jamaica. His reputation grew in American cricket circles after Plummer orchestrated a dramatic turnaround in consistent standards at Broward County Stadium in Lauderhill, where he began working in 2011.Before Plummer’s arrival in Lauderhill, scraping past 100 for a team total was a challenge and the first T20Is on American soil resulted in ugly cricket played between New Zealand and Sri Lanka in 2010. But after Plummer was hired to take charge of the pitches at Lauderhill ahead of the West Indies first visit in 2012, the reputation of the venue changed virtually overnight from a batting graveyard to a T20 scoring paradise where 200 became a par score.Plummer was lured away from Lauderhill to Pearland by Muhammad in 2014 but left a few years later for another brief stint in Lauderhill before being recruited back following the 2018 USA trial debacle in Pearland. True to his reputation, Plummer has once again begun producing high scoring tracks at Moosa. The best evidence of that came in the MiLC playoff quarterfinal last September when former India U-19 captain Unmukt Chand blasted an unbeaten 132 off 69 balls to help the eventual champion Silicon Valley Strikers chase down a target of 185. Plummer has continued working around the clock in recent months to ensure the wickets, outfields and drainage at Moosa Stadium are in pristine condition.USA men’s national team gathers for a camp at Moosa Stadium under then head coach Pubudu Dassanayake in 2017•Peter Della Penna”When Sam came back, we realized we needed to do a lot of sand work,” Muhammad said. “Last year after MiLC, we brought in 100 truck loads of sand and we kept doing aeration to keep on improving it. That has really helped us. I believe if Sam was there [in 2018] and he knew the problem, it would have not been made worse.”Moosa Stadium was in competition to secure hosting rights for the pair of USA’s upcoming ODI series with Prairie View Cricket Complex, a much larger venue with four turf pitch fields that opened in 2018 located 50 miles northwest of downtown Houston. Though Prairie View is larger and ideal for staging events with four or more teams in order to play matches simultaneously, it currently lacks adequate infrastructure beyond the boundary rope necessary for hosting international teams.By contrast, Moosa Stadium has a pavilion with change rooms that include showers and ice bath recovery facilities, covered nets as well as permanent broadcast facilities. Combine all of that with Plummer’s reputation for producing consistent wickets and that gave Moosa Stadium the edge over Prairie View for hosting the upcoming ODIs.”I always believed that if we want the youth of America to come, those who go to the NBA games and other very well-built structures, they’re used to certain standards,” Muhammad said. “If you want them to have any interest, you have to build something acceptable to their standards. That was one of the reasons we wanted to build all those things. Last year before MiLC, we put in fiber-optic cables all the way around. It means you can hook up any number of cameras now for any international game and it saves money. When we ran an event in 2016, we had to spend $45,000 just in rentals and it’s not practical. It was important to add it for broadcasting because without it, it becomes hard to broadcast or live stream.”All of the recent upgrades that helped Moosa Stadium secure ODI status also makes the venue a strong candidate to be assigned matches at the 2024 Men’s T20 World Cup that USA is co-hosting with the West Indies. The facility has permanent seating for 6,000 people that can be expanded for up to 20,000 with temporary bleachers. But capacity will be temporarily capped at 2,500 for the upcoming ODIs due to municipal permit logistics. Muhammad also owns another 38 acres of undeveloped land adjacent to the current 24-acre location of Moosa Stadium that he has designated to be converted into parking lot space for large scale events.”What we plan to do in the next 12 months, put in bleachers and more parking and additional stuff for the T20 World Cup, I think Pearland will be put on the world map as more cricket comes and it will help Pearland and Brazoria County,” Muhammad said. “If you look at the other major sports, the [NFL] Texans and [NBA] Rockets and MLS soccer, they are all about 14-18 miles away and are very close. Having cricket in the mix with those sports and close to downtown will help Pearland overall.”When I was first building it, people told me I was crazy. But I believed it would happen. When I started building in 2013, nobody knew Houston [cricket] back then. Everyone knew about Woodley Park in California. But Moosa has really changed the cricket future. Especially now after Prairie View has come in, Houston has so much to offer as a cricket center.”

And who is the youngest batter to make a first-class double-hundred?

Steven Lynch29-Mar-2022Kraigg Brathwaite now has 25 Test wickets, with each one being a different batter. Who has the most Test wickets without dismissing the same man twice? asked Lachlan McBeath from Australia

That’s a nice easy one, as those 25 different wickets by Kraigg Brathwaite is the Test record. Next comes Mohammad Ashraful, whose 21 wickets for Bangladesh were all different people. The Sri Lankan left-arm seamer Sajeewa de Silva follows him with 16, one more than the Surrey and England pair of Gareth Batty and Mark Butcher.In all international cricket, Ashraful took 47 wickets, again without ever dismissing the same batter twice. He’s well clear of a trio on 28 – Dillon Heyliger of Canada, Oman’s Fayyaz Butt, and Mark Jonkman of the Netherlands.When was the first-ever first-class match? asked Simon Duke from England

The match that the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians considers to be the inaugural first-class fixture was played 250 years ago this year: on Broadhalfpenny Down in Hambledon, Hampshire beat “England” by 53 runs in a two-day game that started on June 24, 1772. John Small, one of the game’s first notable batters, made 78 for Hampshire; the might of England managed only one run more between them in their second innings. Three years later, also at Hambledon, Small made what is now recognised as the maiden first-class century – 138 for Hampshire against Surrey.Both captains scored 150s in the Bridgetown Test – how rare is this? asked Ahson Atif from India

That double by Joe Root (153) and Kraigg Brathwaite (160) in the second Test in Bridgetown was the eighth time both captains had made a score of 150 or more in the same Test. The first such double was at Old Trafford in 1964, when Bob Simpson amassed 311 for Australia and Ted Dexter responded with 174 for England. The most recent instance before last week came in Abu Dhabi in March 2021, when Asghar Afghan made 164 for Afghanistan and Sean Williams 151 not out for Zimbabwe.Kumar Kushagra is the sixth youngest batter to score a first-class double-hundred•PTI Has there been an ODI innings in which all 11 players made it into double figures? asked Mahesh Siddique from India

Unlike in Tests (15 instances so far), there hasn’t yet been a one-day international innings in which everyone reached double figures. There are four cases of ten getting there. When West Indies made 246 against Australia in Bridgetown in 1990-91, everyone reached double figures except last man Courtney Walsh, who was out for 4. Pakistan’s 259 for 9 against West Indies in Dhaka in 1998-99 included ten double-figure scores, plus 4 from Shahid Afridi, who opened. When Zimbabwe scored 262 against India in Rajkot in 2000-01, last man Brian Murphy was out for 1. And Robin Uthappa also made 1 as India totalled 275 against Pakistan in Jaipur in 2007-08.There have also been two innings in men’s ODIs that included no double-figure scores at all. When Zimbabwe slipped to 35 all out against Sri Lanka in Harare in April 2004, the highest score was 7, by Dion Ebrahim and Mr Extras. (That was a record low for ODIs at the time, since equalled by the USA against Nepal in Kirtipur in February 2020; Xavier Marshall made 16 of those.) And when Canada slumped to 36 all out – the lowest World Cup total – against Sri Lanka in Paarl in 2003, the highest contributions were a pair of 9s, by opener Desmond Chumney and skipper Joe Harris.A couple more thoughts about that Ranji Trophy runfest between Jharkhand and Nagaland, that was mentioned in last week’s column. Kumar Kushagra, who is only 17, scored 266. And Sushant Mishra bagged a pair despite his team amassing more than a thousand runs. Were either of these records? asked Shreyal Bose and Divyanand Valsan from India

Both of these things were records, depending on how you define them. At 17, Kumar Kushagra was the sixth youngest to score a first-class double-century – Hasan Raza, whose age is disputed, was reportedly only 15 when he scored 204 not out for Karachi Whites against Bahawalpur in Karachi in 1997-98. The others were Ijaz Ahmed (16 in 1984-85), and 17-year-olds Reetinder Sodhi (1997-98), Ambati Rayudu (2002-03) and Johann Myburgh (1997-98). But none of those younger than Kushagra made it to 250, so he is the youngest to reach that particular milestone.The unfortunate Sushant Mishra collected a four-ball pair in the match in Kolkata, despite his side piling up 1297 runs in all. The only other man to bag a pair of ducks in a match in which his side scored more than 1000 runs did it in a Test: the Pakistan legspinner Danish Kaneria, while his side amassed 1078 runs against India in Faisalabad in 2005-06.Shiva Jayaraman of ESPNcricinfo’s stats team helped with some of the above answers.Use our feedback form, or the Ask Steven Facebook page to ask your stats and trivia questions

Two batters walked two different kinds of tightrope, and there was room for only one of them on the other side

Karthik Krishnaswamy26-May-20222:53

Manjrekar: Patidar’s innings not a flash in the pan, there were signs

Existence can feel like a bleak and terrifying ride down a dark and twisty tunnel with only a wonky steering wheel for company, but there are days when everything is bathed in a golden light and it almost, almost feels like you’re in control of your own destiny. Wednesday was such a day for Rajat Patidar.He might have sensed this as early as the third ball of his innings at Eden Gardens. Dushmantha Chameera bowled him a fast, good-length ball that finished on a tight, off-stumpish line, the sort of ball that keeps batters honest even on the flattest of pitches.Patidar stood where he was and punched the ball, meeting it under his eyes with a vertical bat, making contact just as he shifted his weight from front foot to back. The ball sped downwards, into one of the pitches adjacent to the match strip, and bounced over the right hand of the backward point fielder as he threw himself sideways and upwards at full stretch. His colleague from cover point then gave chase, and the ball kept him interested for long enough to attempt a sprawling, stomach-first dive before it eluded his fingertips and skipped over the boundary cushions.Related

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It was a shot of pure timing, with no need for accoutrements such as footwork or follow-through.Batting can be a complicated thing full of interconnected moving parts that only need to fall slightly out of sync for the whole mechanism to collapse. On a day like the one Patidar was having, however, it can feel like all you need to do is stand there, watch the ball, and let your instincts take over.His feet moved when they had to, of course, nimbly and precisely, allowing him to do absurd things like step away from leg stump and carve a low full-toss over cover, one-handed. Or to skip across in the other direction and deflect a yorker over short fine leg, against the around-the-wicket angle. Or, more subtly, to unweight his front foot and pivot on his back foot to hook a short ball – a short ball designed to cramp him for room – over long leg for six.Patidar’s feet moved when they had to, but never more than strictly necessary, and the overwhelming sense that the innings radiated was of stillness. The stillness of the blessed few who have that extra split-second of time – or the illusion of it – to play their shots.KL Rahul is one of those blessed few, and, in the sixth over of Lucknow Super Giants’ innings, he hit a pair of pulled sixes off Mohammed Siraj that suggested he had minutes rather than split-seconds in which to react to the ball. Like Patidar had done time and again during Royal Challengers Bangalore’s innings, Rahul simply stood still and dismissed the ball from his presence.4:28

Daniel Vettori: Coaches need to ‘destigmatise risk’ in KL Rahul’s mind

When he plays shots like these, Rahul looks capable of anything. It’s as if he knows in advance what the bowler will bowl. Presentiment to be involved, surely, when he reverse-lapped Shahbaz Ahmed over his right shoulder in the 11th over, his hands so quick you barely saw them move.Rahul makes these shots look so easy that you begin to wonder why the intervals between them are so often spent so watchfully, full of strolled singles to deep fielders. And on a day like Wednesday, when Super Giants were chasing 208, you wonder even more.There were no such lulls during Patidar’s innings. He hit a four or six every 2.8 balls, and if he hit a boundary early in an over, it was only a prelude to piling more pressure on the bowler with undimmed intent.With that innings fresh in the mind, it was natural to make comparisons when Rahul was batting. Patidar brought up his hundred off his 49th ball, for instance, and Rahul hit a six off his 49th ball to go from 58 to 64.But here’s the thing. Patidar was playing a blinder of an innings on a day when everything went his way. He timed the ball like a dream, and on the rare occasions when he didn’t, luck smiled on him.Patidar was on 59 off 34 when a top-edged swipe off Krunal Pandya ballooned and fell just wide of a diving Mohsin Khan at short third man. He attempted a slog sweep next ball and the ball beat his inside edge and missed leg stump by an inch. Then, when he was on 72 off 40, he mis-hit a pull off Ravi Bishnoi and Deepak Hooda missed a sitter at deep midwicket.And Patidar’s team was batting first. Rahul’s team was chasing. Rahul wasn’t chasing 112 off 54 balls; Super Giants were chasing 208.There is often criticism of Rahul’s conservative middle-overs approach – much of it justified – when his team bats first and ends up with totals that aren’t as far above par as they may otherwise be. But this innings wasn’t the same thing.And it wasn’t entirely about intent or its absence. There was a seven-over period immediately after the powerplay during which Rahul hit just the one boundary, but this was at least partly down to genuinely good defensive bowling, particularly from Harshal Patel, who got more purchase out of the pitch with his cutters than any other fast bowler on the day.”Yes, I think now, looking back, yes, it was just about two big hits in the middle overs and that could have gotten us over the line,” Rahul said in his post-match press conference. “It’s not that we didn’t try to hit those fours or sixes. We were trying, but in the middle they bowled really well. I think Harshal’s two overs in the middle were what pushed us back a little bit, because he went I think two overs for seven or eight runs [eight runs], he didn’t give away much, and he really changed his pace well. He bowled to the field, and that’s where we were pushed back a little bit.”After that quiet period, Rahul, Hooda and Marcus Stoinis hit seven sixes in the space of four overs to bring the equation down to 41 off 18 balls. If Super Giants had been offered this equation – that too with Rahul and Stoinis at the crease – at the start of their innings, they would probably have taken it.When the 18th over began, the predominantly Royal Challengers-supporting crowd were the quietest they had been all evening.1:48

KL Rahul: Harshal’s two overs in the middle pushed us back

On this overcast Kolkata evening, two batters performed very different high-wire acts. Patidar risked his wicket with every audacious shot he attempted, and the shots didn’t look all that risky when they came off because he was batting in a bubble of pure timing. And luck saved him each time he threatened to slip off the tightrope.The risk Rahul took was to minimise the risk of losing his wicket, and to back himself and his colleagues to deal with a steep asking rate in the closing overs of the match. He risked losing and having his approach criticised widely, when he could have gone harder, scored quicker, been out for 28 off 16 balls, say, and earned praise even if his team had lost by a bigger margin.The argument that a 16-ball 28 is a better innings than a 58-ball 79 in a chase of 208 is, of course, a valid one, and the argument won’t need to be made any longer if T20 evolves to the point where most teams have quality hitters batting from Nos. 1 to 8. But Rahul – a T20 player capable of every shot, but also one with hardwired longer-format instincts – was batting on the evening of May 25, 2022, for a team that has had middle-order issues all season, and he was trying to win them a match in what he felt was the best possible way.It came down to 41 off 18 balls, then 33 off 12, and then, after a spate of wides from Josh Hazlewood, 28 off 9. Then Rahul shuffled across his stumps, expecting the bowler to attempt a wide yorker, and got what he was looking for, misdirected so it was a full-toss. He looked for the lap over short fine leg, a shot he plays as well as anyone in the game.There are days when everything goes your way, and there are days when they don’t, but you battle your way through it and hope things work out. Rahul middled the ball, timing it reasonably well but not perfectly, getting a decent amount of power on the shot but not the elevation he desired to safely clear short fine leg.On another day, the ball may have travelled a couple of yards either side of where it ended up, and eluded the fielder’s fingertips. On this day, Shahbaz Ahmed leaped diagonally to his left, reached into the air, and landed with the ball nestled between his hands. On this day, two batters walked two different kinds of tightrope, and there was room for only one of them on the other side.

Phoenix victories and success of home-grown stars are helping to draw in new fans

Matt Roller16-Aug-2022There is a huge cheer as Moeen Ali walks towards the South Stand at Edgbaston. A sprawling queue has formed at the end of Birmingham Phoenix’s seven-wicket win against Trent Rockets, all desperate for an autograph or a selfie with the captain and talisman. “Super, super Mo, Super Moeen Ali,” has been ringing out around the ground all evening.Half an hour earlier, Moeen’s devastating assault on Lewis Gregory – whose third set of five cost 23 runs – had removed any scoring pressure from Phoenix’s chase as the men closed out their sixth win from six at Edgbaston. The result completed a Phoenix double after Amy Jones – like Moeen, born and raised in the West Midlands – closed out the women’s chase alongside Ellyse Perry.”It’s something that we thrive off and buzz off,” Moeen says, after being pulled away from his fans to speak to the media. “It gives you a lift as a team. When the crowd is chanting your name and you get that support, it is awesome.”The reason we’re playing the Hundred is to attract a new audience and to make it simple for them to understand and enjoy games like this. Our jobs are not just about trying to win games – it’s about trying to inspire the next generation.”The West Midlands is home to a number of the UK’s bellwether political constituencies, where local results over a number of general elections have been mirrored by the outcome at a national level. Nuneaton, 25 miles east of Birmingham, has voted in line with the country as a whole since 1997; Worcester, 40 miles south-west, has done so since 1979.In a similar vein, the West Midlands might be seen as a bellwether for the Hundred. A short-form competition at the height of summer was always going to work in London, where there is always a huge demand for tickets, but Birmingham is a different kettle of fish. Edgbaston has hosted – and sold out – T20 Finals Day every year since 2013 but the Blast’s group stages have proved a harder sell.In 2019, the final pre-Hundred season with full crowds permitted, their average attendance across seven home games was around 9,500. “It’s a very diverse, industrial city,” Stuart Cain, Warwickshire’s chief executive, says. “You have to work hard to get people to spend money. Not because they’re tight, but it’s well-earned money. You have to give them a good day out.”The kids at Edgbaston get into the action during the Men’s Hundred•PA Images via Getty ImagesIn its first season, the Hundred came to life at Edgbaston. Phoenix’s women came from nowhere to qualify for the knockout stages, while the men were unbeaten at home on their way to top spot in the group stages. The second season has started brightly, too: Will Smeed hit the Hundred’s first hundred last week and so far the home teams have won three out of three.Crowds last year were significantly higher than in the Blast, with an average attendance of 15,500, and the Hundred managed to draw significantly more interest from Birmingham’s South Asian communities than the Blast ever had. “The new concept and the freshness has appealed to everyone,” Cain says, “so by default, if 40% of your city is South Asian, you’re going to get more people coming in from those communities.”Whether by chance or design, Phoenix’s squads have featured several British Asian players who have become an integral part of the new teams’ attempts to create an identity: Moeen, Issy Wong and Abtaha Maqsood. “Moeen is a local lad and Issy has come up through the ranks from the age of 10 or 11,” Cain says. “Abtaha was recommended to us and it has been awesome to send out the message that you can be a practising Muslim, wear the hijab, and be a professional cricketer.”Warwickshire have taken significant steps to make Edgbaston a more inclusive ground, particularly in its attempts to crack down on crowd abuse. “I think that’s the best way to give any community faith that it’s OK to come here,” Cain says.The Edgbaston app has been updated to allow quick, anonymous reports if fans experience any issues, while the installation of a high-definition camera facing the Eric Hollies Stand facilitated an arrest after allegations of racist abuse during the England-India Test earlier this summer. A man has since been charged with a racially-aggravated public order offence.The attendances for Monday’s double-header were impressive – 9,859 for the women’s game (on a weekday afternoon) and 15,800 for the men’s – not least given the numbers of events Edgbsaton has hosted this year: a Test, a T20I, seven Blast group games, Finals Day, and the Commonwealth Games. The swathe of bright-orange merchandise in the crowd suggested an affinity with Phoenix, even at an early stage of their existence.Related

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Crucially, some of the Hundred’s audience appear to have become hooked. Blast crowds this season were “slightly ahead” of 2019 figures despite the tournament being played earlier in the summer, and Edgbaston sold over 1,000 white-ball season tickets, granting access to every Blast and Hundred matchday.”This debate about ‘is the Hundred going to kill the Blast?’ is the wrong one: the genie is out of the bottle,” Cain says. “”I don’t agree that the Blast is for one audience and the Hundred is for a different one. There are people that love cricket and are coming to both, but there are some that love the Blast and will never come to the Hundred, and some that will come to the Hundred and will never come to the Blast.”Any new concept that brings in new crowds, new sponsors, free-to-air broadcast – I can’t see what there is to dislike. If you look at other sports – golf, tennis, hockey – they must be sitting there now in absolute envy about what cricket has done, to find a format that the BBC, Sky, fans and sponsors are all engaged in.”You’ve got to respect members’ opinions. Our job is to make sure we don’t lose the history and tradition of red-ball cricket but, at the same time, try and move the game on in a way that acknowledges the world is changing. We’re not trying to downgrade Championship cricket. We’re trying to find new ways of reaching audiences in a world where time, money and attention spans are tight.”The Hundred and its knock-on effects on the rest of the summer schedule remain hugely divisive, but it is clear that in its bellwether region, it is doing something right. As Cain summarises: “the second the sport stops criticising itself and doing itself down, the better off we’ll be.”

Skipping IPL 2023 gives him the opportunity to play county cricket and push for a Test recall

Matt Roller19-Dec-2022When the longlist of players who had entered next week’s IPL auction was first circulated around franchises at the start of the month, Chris Woakes’ name was a surprise omission.Woakes has played for three different teams in his three IPL seasons – Kolkata Knight Riders in 2017, Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2018 and Delhi Capitals in 2021 – and would almost certainly have found a suitor on December 23. While he might not have sparked the scale of bidding war expected for his England team-mates Ben Stokes and Sam Curran, the demand for seam-bowling allrounders is always high at mini-auctions.But after missing the whole of the 2022 summer with injury and watching the transformation of England’s Test team under Stokes and Brendon McCullum from afar, Woakes explained that he will instead spend April and May trying to force his way into Ashes contention through performances for Warwickshire in the County Championship.”It wasn’t an easy decision, by any means,” Woakes told ESPNcricinfo. “There’s still a part of me that wishes I could go because the IPL is a great tournament and financially it could be very rewarding – but I didn’t want to make the decision solely on finance. It’s a tricky scenario: having just won a World Cup, potentially stock could be high. There are obviously some other players who are likely to go big but I could have been next on the list behind them.”I had conversations with a lot of people and some with franchises as well, who sounded keen, which made it harder to pull out. But having not played any cricket in the English summer last year, it’s a good opportunity for me to set myself up for, hopefully, a really strong summer with England.”It’s an Ashes year and I haven’t played much red-ball cricket. I need to suggest to people and remind people that I can play red-ball cricket and get through it – both from a fitness point of view, but also to show what I can do to try and have a go at being part of the Ashes.”Related

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Woakes spoke to Rob Key, England’s managing director, during the T20I tour to Pakistan in September, who reassured him that he was still seen as an all-format player. “He was very clear that I was still a part of the Test plans,” Woakes recalled, “but obviously I needed to get myself fit, and get my knee right.”Having taken the new ball during England’s successful T20 World Cup campaign, he was then left out of the squad for the ongoing Test series but is at peace with his omission. “At that moment, the World Cup was the priority,” Woakes said, “and we needed guys going to Pakistan that had fitness behind them, or that bowl a touch quicker. My success in the subcontinent with a red ball has been quite limited, so I feel like it made sense.”With two young daughters at home, he has been awake early in the morning watching the series on TV. “To go 2-0 up in Pakistan is an incredible effort. They’re such hard surfaces to force results on, so to do it in the fashion that they have has been amazing. Credit should go to Ben’s captaincy and the way the bowlers have bowled as well: you can score as many runs as you want to but unless you can take 20 wickets, you don’t win Test matches. It’s been great to watch and I’d really love to be a part of it.”Woakes made his Test debut in the final match of England’s Ashes win in 2013 but missed their 2015 victory through injury and has been part of one drawn series and two defeats in Australia in the years since. As a result, he is desperate to have a crack at them next summer. While his stock fell slightly after a difficult 2021-22 winter – he took 11 wickets at 52.36 across England’s Australia and Caribbean tours – he remains a formidable bowler in English conditions, with a career average of 22.63 in home Tests.”Winning an Ashes series where you play a really strong part would be extremely rewarding”•Getty Images”Winning an Ashes series where you play a really strong part would be extremely rewarding. It’s something that I probably would like to tick off,” Woakes said. “The 2019 series was a tight one with some amazing games to be part of, but there’s nothing like winning an Ashes series. Fingers crossed, that’s something we, as an England team, can do in the summer.”Skipping the IPL will give him the opportunity to play for his county, Warwickshire, in the early months of the Championship season. A combination of England commitments and injuries has heavily restricted his availability in recent years: he played a crucial walk-on role in their 2021 title win, but has only made five appearances for them across formats in the last three seasons.”The IPL is hard to turn down because the best players go there, it’s financially rewarding and it’s been brilliant for my career,” Woakes said, “but the trade-off is that opportunity to play for Warwickshire, which I’ve always loved doing. It’s tricky as an international player, particularly with the current schedule, and more so as a bowler: you don’t get the opportunity to come back and play much for your county.”I don’t blame members and fans for giving myself and many other players a bit of stick for not playing for their counties enough, but the schedule means it is just so hard to do now. I love playing for Warwickshire and I’d love to play more, it’s just almost impossible. It’ll be a good time to put the Bear back on and hopefully put in some early performances and get myself in the reckoning for the Ashes.”His involvement in the inaugural ILT20, where he has a contract with Sharjah Warriors, means that the financial blow of missing the IPL will be less severe than it might otherwise have been and illustrates that he has plenty of attractive offers coming his way from the franchise world.But Woakes insisted that, at 33, he has no intention to give up red-ball cricket any time soon and that his knee – which kept him out of seven Tests and 15 white-ball internationals in the summer – feels “a lot better than it was” after surgery in August left him in a race against the clock to be fit for the World Cup.Woakes took the new ball at the T20 World Cup•Alex Davidson/Getty Images”That time might come, but while I’m still capable and still available for selection, my appetite for Test cricket is still really high,” he said. “With the age I am, as a fast bowler, you can easily get sucked into being pigeon-holed as being close to the end, almost. You’ve seen with Stuart [Broad] and Jimmy [Anderson] – and I know they don’t play white-ball cricket – that we try and keep ourselves as fit as we possibly can and there’s no reason why you can’t play until you are a lot older nowadays.”I’ll try and play as long as I possibly can. I certainly don’t want to hang on. That decision might be made for me and if that’s the case, I might be a white-ball specialist one day, but whilst I can and whilst I’m enjoying it, I’ll try and be that three-format cricketer for as long as I possibly can.”Woakes looks set to travel to South Africa for England’s ODIs in late January, and is yet to discuss with the team’s management whether he will travel to New Zealand for the Test series or Bangladesh for the white-ball tour in February-March, with the short turnaround between the two tours likely requiring England to pick completely separate squads.But for now, Woakes has the rare chance to spend the Christmas period at home with friends and family. “It’s been nice to spend a bit of time decompressing, letting it all sink in after the T20 World Cup. My two young girls have been keeping me busy: my eldest daughter is four-and-a-half and my youngest has just turned two. Especially having missed last Christmas, to have a whole December at home will be really nice.”